An important daily practice of various Agile teams is having a daily short team meeting. It is known as standup in XP terminology, or daily scrum meeting in SCRUM terminology. Well, it may be called anything depending upon the flavor of Agile methodology you use, the points which are discussed during a standup (we're going to use the term, standup, henceforth) are:
- What you did yesterday
- Problems you are facing at the moment
- Your agenda for the day
Why is it important?
This discussion helps form the basis for pair rotations considering skill sets of people, durations for the pair, and the objectives for each of those new formed pairs. A daily standup eases the intra-team communication, facilitates progress tracking, compensates for the lack of documentation, and also, it keeps a check on people who otherwise would sit idle entire day procrastinating the task at hand (Yes, there are such people present).
What are the challenges?
With so much of goodness of this indispensible practice, it is quite commonly visible that the projects don't get benefited to the entirety. Therefore, following few points make it very important for the team to achieve the benefits of a standup
Teams not understanding the spirit of the practice:
People fail to understand how the standup is actually shaping their lives if they individually haven't experienced its importance. This applies to many people, for instance, to those who have been working on a particular bit alone having not a lot of interference from peers, e.g. sometimes the API developers who work to the specs. In a huge enterprise application, few people work on view layer and need to have interaction with UI designers and sometimes with service developers. Similarly, the people working on Database design may have to interact continuously with architects and designers (especially if an ORM is being used). People who are working independently may sometimes falsely believe that they don't need to attend to standups since no one is going to help them – they are just working to specs.
Remedy: Educate people about importance of the practice or hire people who are suitable for agile. Any methodology can work only if its values and principles are well absorbed by its followers.
Long duration of a standup:
A standup is held having all the members standing on feet just to make sure that people finish their speech quickly, failing which they would be tired and would wish to run off to their desks. However, people having a lot to say sometimes seem to forget that their speech is tiring others out.
Remedy: Ideally, long discussions should be taken offline after throwing in enough clues into their standup speeches. Failing this, such discussions make others withdraw interest and stop paying attention.
Large size of the project team:
More people, more speeches, and more time spent during the discussion. Also, not all the people are always genuinely interested in listening to each single word everybody has to utter.
Remedy:
- This can be avoided, limiting ourselves to say something like, "finished writing xxx() method to allow customer to view further details." People who are interested in this can speak to you personally after the standup.
- In some cases, dividing the team into smaller teams can just help your standup achieve its goals.
Boredom listening to irrelevant speeches:
Again, occurs to people who are not much interested in others talks. E.g. the members of the business team are not into technology and can find technical talks very much boring.
Remedy: A smart project manager can avoid this making the talks interesting, stating the mapping of what the technical guy spoke with an appropriate business requirement, sometimes cracking few one-liner jokes and keep the odd men's interest alive.
